Shipwrecks and Pearl Shells: Somerset Cape York 1864-1877
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SHIPWRECKS AND PEARL SHELLS: SOMERSET CAPE YORK I86I+-I877. Dr. D.J. Farnfield At the eastern tip of Cape York lies Albany Passage. It is a narrow very deep channel with strong currents between the mainland and Albany island with steep hills on both sides. It was here on a beautiful mainland site that the British and Queensland governments established in I86I+ a settlement they named Somerset. Mark Twain once remarked that Australian history was full of curiosities; which was what made it so exciting. Somerset was in many ways a curiosity; a throw-back to the early years of Australian settlement when outposts were positioned around the coast as "spring-boards for guarding or promoting a trade route, not beachheads for settling the interior." In the l860s most Australian colonists were concerned with developing the natural resources of the interior of their continent; mineral, pastoral and agricultural wealth. The main flow of trade was between the south-eastern colonies and Britain. But Somerset at this time was symbolic of matters which had been an earlier interest of New South Wales; guarding a sea-lane, promoting trade with South-East Asia and a maritime industry. It was out of its time, the last of 'the limpet ports'; to use a phrase coined by Geoffrey Blainey. In conception Somerset was many things to many people who had high hopes for it as a multi-purpose establishment. Its main purpose was humanitarian; to provide a harbour of refuge for mariners from the numerous ships which were wrecked in the perilous passage through Torres Strait. Since the closure of Port Essington in I8I+9 there was no refuge nearer than Portuguese Timor. The Torres route was being more frequently used with the introduction of steam-ships which were able to proceed in both directions through the Strait. Sailing ships dependent on the south-east trade winds had only been able to sail from east to west. The British government also thought of Somerset as a strategic outpost to guard the increasingly important sea-lane which linked the Indian and Pacific oceans. The Queenslanders had visions of a busy commercial port; a replica of Singapore, With an optimism blind to the geographical realities they compared the Straits of Malacca to the Torres Straits. The Admiralty and the shipping companies saw the vital necessity of a coaling station to supply the needs of the steamships, 67 JEAN FARNFIELD with an enormous appetite for coal, making the long journey from Batavia to Brisbane. Missionary societies in Britain with a vision of civilizing and Christianizing the poor^benighted heathen of the world saw Somerset as a base for evangelizing the Cape York Aborigines and the savages of the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea. Today Somerset is little more than a memory. The physical evidence of its former existence is the site of the magistrate's house, an old stone wall, and the graveyard close to the beach, for it was abandoned in 1877 as an official outpost. What buildings had siirvived the destructive erosion of white ants were removed to Thursday Island, which became the administrative centre for the Torres Strait islands. The scenery is as beautiful as ever but the human life has gone except for occasional visitors from the Bamaga Aboriginal Reserve. On August 1st I86I+ the scene was quite different. The beach was alive with men going about their tasks of establishing the settlement or looking round the unfamiliar site trying to assess its capabilities. They were twelve hundred miles and a dangerous sea journey from Brisbane but a government department there had managed nevertheless to make their work doubly arduous by sending up a totally unsuitable dray. According to an eye-witness it was "made entirely of pine, the shafts are not long enough to admit a horse of the smallest size, and the wheels are but three feet high." To get the building materials up to the position they were needed on Somerset point, they had to devise another method, "a tramway laid down along the beach to the foot of the cliff, to which the timber was carried on a truck, and from thence hauled by a winch and block to the top." This incident, one of many, was typical of the Brisbane government's lack of appreciation of the real problems of the isolated settlement. The two ships anchored in the bay from which men were disembarked and livestock and materials unloaded were symbolic of the unusual nature of the outpost, which was a joint venture of the Imperial and colonial governments. One was a Royal Navy vessel, H.M.S. Salamander under the command of the Hon. John Carnegie, and the other the Golden Eagle, a merchantman chartered in Brisbane. By an arrangement between the two governments, the British government had undertaken to supply the initial finance, a detachment of marines for guard duties, a naval surgeon and 68 SHIPWRECKS AND PEARL SHELLS: SOMERSET CAPE YORK I86I+-I877 regular visits by a naval vessel to supply the station. The Queensland government, which insisted on overall control of the outpost, supplied the civilian personel and some of the buildings. The 'Imperial personel', as they were quaintly called at the time, disembarked from H.M.S. Salamander. They were a naval surgeon, and 21 marines in thick English uniforms under the command of a young lieutenant, Robert Pascoe. They had recently made the long voyage from Portsmouth. Garrison duties in far-off outposts were one of the functions of Britain's 'sea-soldiers' but Somerset must have been one of the more outlandish spots where marines were exiled. Two of them lie in the old cemetery; one the victim of tropical fever, and the other of a festering wound from a barbed Aboriginal spear. The 'colonial party' who disembarked from the Golden Eagle was headed by John Jardine, whom the Queensland government had appointed Police Magistrate in charge of the settlement. Jardine, ex-officer of a Scottish regiment, had had considerable colonial experience on the squatting frontier in the Rockhampton district. He was a disciplinarian, a keen naturalist and experienced bushman with an implacable attitude to Aborigines, whom he regarded as dangerous enemies of white settlement. The harsh methods he used to ensure the safety of the white settlers led to a sharp disagreement between him and Lt. Pascoe. He also regarded the marines as 'babies in bushcraft', and adopted the attitude of the old colonial towards the 'new chums' . All in all relationships were not particularly harmonious until the marines were recalled in I867. Jardine had with him his youngest son, I8 year old Johnny, whom the naval surgeon describes as 'looking like the ideal of yo\ing Australia' with his 'loose Baltic shirt' showing 'his sinewy, sun-burned neck, his cabbage tree hat' shading 'his brown curls and comely face'. In the first year of the settlement two more Jardines arrived, Frank and Alec, who accomplished an incredible overland journey with horses and cattle from the Rockhampton district to Cape York. Frank remained after the rest of the family had gone south again and twice became government magistrate. Wilson, the Government surveyor, by all accounts an odd melancholy fellow was urged to proceed with the town survey of Somerset with all speed. Considering the land was undulating and covered with thick scrub 69 JEAN FARNFIELD he managed very well with a town plan, for town plots in Somerset were sold in Brisbane at well-attended public auctions in April and May I866. Merchants, master builders, bank managers, the Dutch consul and other optimists bought 109 town allotments for a total of £2093.3.0. The idea of a 'second Singapore' certainly caught on in Brisbane and in 1865 Somerset was declared a 'free port', with the hopes of capturing the trade with the islands of the Torres Strait and later of New Guinea. In 1857 the Dutch had declared Macassar a free port, emulating British policy at Singapore, and a Joint Committee of the Queensland Parliament was told in I865 that they showed signs of being successful in syphoning off the trade of the Torres Strait islands. The Queensland government by use of the free port technique hoped in its turn to capture the trade from the Dutch. However the trade did not eventuate, nor was the town of Somerset ever built. The records do not show whether those who invested in town plots ever recovered their money. There is a wealth of material describing life at Somerset during the first four years of the settlement; the lengthy reports of the police magistrate, a highly-coloured sensational narrative by the naval surgeon, the letters of Lt. Pascoe, and an account by the surveyor. Their attitudes and personalities are very different but they tell the same story, that the reality of Somerset is strikingly different from the Westminster or Brisbane dream of an important strategic outpost or a successful commercial city. The marines are bored and homesick; they are a garrison force but their military duties seem pointless as there is little to defend in the absence of predicted Malay pirates and foreign 'men-of-war'. They spend their days clearing the bush, trying to grow vegetables or looking after the sheep on Albany island. The only enemies of the white settlement are the Aboriginal inhabitants of Cape York, and the marines do not consider killing Aborigines as part of their assignment. A major part of the accounts of life at Somerset is concerned with the day-to-day conflict between the white settlers and the Aborigines. It is a typical picture of Australian frontier confrontation exacerbated by the extreme isolation of the settlement.